Greenfield Hall
by ClaireBear1982
Summary: Remus!AU. A spin on Peter Pan. Slice of life.


A/N: QLFC. Captain of the Wimbourne Wasps. Round 9 - Peter Pan. Remus!AU.

The community Remus lived in was a fairly small one. The village contained maybe two hundred residents. The only thing of beauty was the grand old house on the edge of the village, but it was no longer in possession of the family who had once owned all the surrounding land. Greenfield Hall was now an orphanage.

Remus was very active in the village. In between helping to run the Sunday school after church every Sunday morning, he also helped the farmers with odd jobs that needed doing. However, the best part of his week, in his mind, was when he would visit the children at the orphanage on Saturday afternoons.

Once a week, he would buy two pounds of sweets and package them up into little paper twists. Then, once he got the children settled in front of the fire in the dining room, he would hand them out to the poor waifs. His big heart went out to each and every one of them. He couldn't imagine growing up in a place like this, to not know who your parents were, to not have a connection with your past and therefore not know who you are. They were all lost children.

Not only did he hand out sweets to the children, he would also sit in the big squashy armchair by the fire and tell them stories. Remus didn't need a book of fairytales; he had imagination enough to make them up on the spot, quite often leaving the children agape and in wonder at the tales he spun.

He would also sit on the floor with younger children and play games with them. The boys' favourite was marbles, whilst the girls' favourite was sewing. The previous Christmas, the girls had all clubbed together with the penny pocket money they received once a week and bought Remus a silver thimble to protect his finger. Not only did Remus use it when he was sewing, he also carried it around with him as a good luck charm.

Remus wouldn't just sew with the girls either; whilst he was telling them tales, he would sit and darn anything the children needed mended too. The staff of the orphanage were always so busy that it fell to Remus, or the older girls of the house, to help in any way they could. They were living in a period of austerity - it was a case of make do and mend. The First World War had ended, leaving a million men dead, or in Remus' case, injured beyond repair. One of the older girls, who had to have been about fifteen at the time, had asked him where he'd learnt to sew, and he told her that when he'd been a soldier in the trenches, they'd had to learn to mend their socks, and because of that, he'd perfected the art.

During the summer months, when the weather was warm, Remus would quite often take the children out into the huge garden and play games like Cowboys and Indians or Pirates. Occasionally, they would re-enact scenes from their favourite Bible stories, or fairytales. They hated it when Remus left, but they knew that he would always be back the following week.

This routine continued on for years. Remus watched as they grew, and his heart ached for the children who reached sixteen and could no longer live at the hall and found jobs either in the village, or the outlying villages surrounding Greenfield Hall. He liked it when the children stayed in the village as that meant he would still see them regularly. Oh, how he wished he had the money to buy Greenfield Hall from its benefactors just so the children wouldn't have to leave him and the only home they'd ever known. But it just wasn't possible; he was barely making enough shillings a week to keep himself afloat once he'd paid his rent to the family he lodged with.

They were a lovely family with two young sons and a baby daughter. Quite often, Remus and the boys could be found sat in front of the range, telling stories on the colourful peg rug that Remus himself had made as a Christmas present for the family. It had become a ritual now, especially at bedtime, and Remus was always happy to oblige. After all, Mr Darling didn't have the time; by the time he came in from the fields, he was far too tired and would quite often fall asleep reading his paper by the fire. Mrs Darling rarely had the time to sit and tell stories either; there was simply no room for anything else in between taking care of her infant daughter, baking bread every morning, making meals for the family, and doing all of the housework. Being a farmer's wife was a hard job.

They were grateful when Remus had come to live with them, as he would often take the boys out to the fields with him to help the other farmers who were shorthanded. When Remus wasn't required to help in the fields or in the village, he could be found in the small copse by the Darling's farm with the boys in the den they'd built out of sticks.

Life pretty much continued this way until all the boys from the orphanage were old enough to go to war again. Remus hated the idea that his children would have to face another war, and so soon. After all, the last war was supposed to have been the war to end all wars, and yet here they were, twenty-one years later, facing another battle for the King and the country.

When the time came for each of his boys to leave the village, to join the service they'd been called to, or signed up for, Remus would personally visit that child and give them a special memento that would be personal to them, something that reminded them how they'd been as a child, how Remus had known them. He would then shake their hand and wish them luck, tell them to take care, and to be safe. He tried as hard as he could to be optimistic - outwardly. Inwardly, in his gut, he knew he would likely never see that child again. God be damned for allowing another war to rip families and communities apart like this.

The first death that touched Remus and the Darling family came in the form of a telegram. It told them that their son John had been killed in the D-Day landings. Of course, the Darling's had been devastated; Remus also had been. But there was an air of quiet acceptance about him. Having been a soldier of the trenches, he knew just how bloodthirsty a war could be. As more and more telegrams flooded the village with the news that they'd lost another one of their own, Remus found his heart breaking over and over again. Remus didn't know which was worse: the tension of waiting to hear that another of their number had been massacred, or the news that they all feared had come to pass.

Once six years of war had passed and peace came, most of the boys who Remus had watched grow were lost to them. But to Remus, they would always be his lost boys; lost boys with whom he'd had the pleasure of playing games with and telling stories to.

Remus had begged the benefactors to have a memorial made of all the boys lost; this took a considerable amount of years to achieve, due to the war records office being a mess. He only hoped that before death had grabbed them, the boys had thought of his stories, and that this had brought them some sense of comfort in face of death.

By the time the early fifties awoke, Remus could no longer travel up to the big, old, beautiful house. He was constantly in too much pain with his legs due to his injuries in the Great War. When Remus passed away, the village came together not only to remember the man he'd been, but to remember him as a man who had done so much for some many whilst asking for nothing in return. He would be happy to know he'd affected so many lives, and to once more meet his lost boys, to guide them and show them that being lost did not have to be so bad.


End file.
